Mutt Insanity

I read email. I read a lot of email. In the course of reading this mail,
I used Elm for the longest time, but there wasn't any development going
on with it. Then I tried
Michael Elkins'elm me until he gave up on Elm.
I've looked at the code. I'm impressed he lasted that long.

So, he started from scratch, and the result is Mutt, the Mongrel
of all mail readers.

``All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.'' -me, circa 1995

Mutt Helpers

The following are programs and additions which can be used along with
mutt. There are several places where mutt calls external programs, or
perhaps you need a script to format mail before it hits your inbox.

Mutt Patches

Mutt does suck less. But even with Michael's responsiveness to changes,
suggestions, and patches, he won't take everything. These are my
patches which haven't made it into mutt (yet) or aren't likely to ever
make it into the official release.

Note, the readme file associated with each patch should contain useful
information about the patch, and possibly problems associated with them.

This patch adds support for NNTP (ie, usenet news) to mutt. It is not
meant to make mutt into a newsreader, but allow you to treat newsgroups
the same as your mailboxes. This patch requires inews.
See the README for more information.

This patch allows you to add support for RFC 1864 to mutt. This causes
mutt to add a Content-MD5: header to each outgoing message (or
section of a multipart message) which is the BASE64 encoding of the
MD5 Digest of the message body. In addition, this patch will check
the Content-MD5 header of a message you are viewing and tell you whether
the header matches the computed value or not.

First Version Patched: 0.51
Last Version Patched: 0.58.1
Author: Brandon Long
PGP Effects: None, but it's around the handler.c part, so the patch might failRFC 1864 -
README -
PATCH -
Extra Files

This patch causes mutt to count the number of messages and new messages
in a folder when you are using the mutt Folder Mode (dirlist.c).
This has a lot of overhead, and is slow (especially over NFS), but if
you have cycles to spare, or few mail folders, this is for you.

First Version Patched: 0.47
Author: Brandon Long
PGP Effects: NonePATCH

Are you the type of person who receives a lot of attachments, and they aren't
all in MIME format, or Encoded with one of the formats supported by mutt?
Then UUDeview support is for you. It supports uuencoding, xxencoding,
and BinHEX, and will automatically handle files which are split over
multiple messages. This patch was provided by the author of UUDeview,
to work with UUDeview version 0.5.7 and Mutt 0.44. This means that
it probably won't patch cleanly against newer versions of mutt. If you
do get it to patch, provide me with a new patch.

Does it irritate you that mutt has a separate sequence to show you
the pgp output on pgp signed and encrypted messages? This patch
makes mutt parse the output of pgp, and add the results of the
signature check to the paged information where you can view it without
the "second step."

First Version Patched: 0.56
Latest Version Patched: 0.58
Author: Frank Pilhofer
(fp@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de)
PGP Effects: This is a patch for the output of PGP, so it effects it greatly.
This should work against both the US version and the International version,
but it isn't that widely tested, and that may change in later versions.README -
PATCH 0.56.3 -
PATCH 0.57.1 -
PATCH 0.58.1

The "I work for a big public company" disclaimer:
The views expressed on these pages are mine
alone and not those of my employer. I am not now, nor have I ever been
employed to speak for anyone. Well, except my own company, but that's
gone now. For more information, see the Standard
Disclaimer